Owlchemy Labs today announced their next VR parody game Vacation Simulator is set to release for PC VR headsets next month. The PSVR version is slated to launch a little later at some point this summer.
Vacation Simulator will be landing on Steam (Vive, Rift) and the Oculus Store (Rift) on April 9th, priced at $30.
The studio, which created the critically-acclaimed parody game Job Simulator (2016), says their follow-up Vacation Simulator will be much larger than its predecessor and include a total of four destinations at launch: Beach, Forest, Mountain, and Resort. You can find the destination reveal trailer linked above and below.
Like its career-focused big brother, the game tosses you into the year 2060 where robots try their best to approximate what life must have been like, and getting nearly everything wrong in the process. You guessed it. They’re going to screw up vacations too.
We went hands-on with an early prototype of Vacation Simulator back at GDC 2018. Unlike Job Simulator, the upcoming sequel features an iteration on the studio’s node-based teleportation system developed for Rick and Morty: Virtual Rick-ality (2017), which allows you to traverse a few objective-based ‘stations’ instead of standing in a dedicated level. It’s also supposed to be a lot larger than Job Simulator, the studio says.
“Vacation Simulator is bigger than anything we’ve done before, and we’re excited to see how everyone experiences ‘vacation’ in their own way,” says Owlchemy Labs CEO Devin Reimer. “The sheer interactivity and connected world we’ve built with Vacation Simulator makes for truly mind-boggling possibilities. It’s VR— there is no wrong way to play.”
Like we saw in our early hands-on with Vacation Simulator, there’s also a measure of interactivity to the bots now (you don’t just toss ketchup as them), instead letting them fill the position of general questgivers rather than hapless NPCs.
“To interact with Bots in Vacation Simulator, all you need to do is wave,” explains company CTO Andrew Eiche. “You don’t need a button, you immediately go to wave and it just feels natural. It’s a simple, powerful interaction that allows players to interact with characters and connect with the VR world in a very personal way.”
The studio is also putting a much bigger emphasis on avatar creation over Job Simualtor, which is said to include various customization options for avatars such as skin tone, visor color, hair style, hair color, facial hair, and glasses. Outside of the novelty factor of having your own avatar, it should also make game capture more unique to users who want to record or stream their session.